


The King of Rock 'N' Roll

by juliaaamarieee



Category: I Am Not Okay with This (TV 2020)
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Domestic Violence, I'm sorry for this, Physical Abuse, Sad, Stan pines for Syd, Stanley Barber and his dad, Sydney Novak (mentioned), Trauma, Violence, poor stan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:14:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23256760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juliaaamarieee/pseuds/juliaaamarieee
Summary: “Dad, justlisten, please, I--” he begins, taking an unconscious stumble backward and feeling a surge of shame when he realizes it. He starts again and his words tumble out of him, barely formed. “A - a girl ran out in front of me in the dark and I had to swerve to avoid hitting her.”Agirl. Syd is far from just agirlto him, but his dad wouldn't remember her, and whoever the girl was matters not in the least to his father, or to the situation. All that matters is the crushed metal, the beer on his breath, and the fist curling at his side.-Or, what happened between Stanley driving his dad's wrecked car home after the party and the black eye Sydney sees at the bowling alley.
Relationships: Stanley Barber/Sydney Novak
Comments: 13
Kudos: 117





	The King of Rock 'N' Roll

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first attempt at writing fic for this fandom, but I love Stanley Barber a lot and he deserves some justice for what his dad did to him and that black eye. This is how it happened. 
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING!! For severe emotional trauma and actual physical domestic violence. Read on only if you feel comfortable. 
> 
> Please shoot me a comment and let me know what you think.

Stanley Barber drives home.

The air vibrates numbly around him as he drives, knuckles white against the steering wheel and eyes wide and unblinking. He doesn’t know what event from the night to focus on first, so he thinks that maybe he’s not thinking at all, but in reality, all his thoughts are meshing and clashing together in an unpleasant swirling cloud. 

His father is home. He went to a party. Syd said yes to homecoming. But then, most importantly, he crashed his dad’s fucking 1978 Ford Fairmont in a panicked swerve to doge Sydney darting in front of his car in the pouring rain. And then, of course, the explosion. He remembers tears springing to his eyes when he realizes what happened to the car, but getting out and running after her; then hearing her agonized, angry _FUCK!!!_ followed by a shockwave that knocked down an entire circle of trees around her and forced his own body to stumble backwards even on the outskirts of the blast. His racing mind returned to the grocery store incident and steered him to a conclusion that made him feel insane. But he’d been assured what he had seen was real when she screamed at him not to tell a soul. And he wouldn’t. _Won’t_. And he doesn’t know why anything could happen concerning Syd and he would be right there to catch her.

Maybe he _loves_ her. Well, maybe. He lost his virginity to her, and that counts for something. He didn’t think it was that awkward. But that’s another issue for another day. For now, he has bigger fish to fry: surviving coming home. 

_Here’s the big challenge, ladies and gents! Stanley Barber must return home, somehow get past his father, who must NOT find out about the car, and make it to his bed where he can cry or process the craziest day of his fucking life! Can he do it? Time to find out, folks! Here he comes!_

He enters his and Syd’s neighborhood, and watching his home loom above him from the low-leveled car is a far different feeling from returning home during the other ten months of the year, when he’s alone. It feels like pulling up to his doom. The house may as well be a huge fucking guillotine.

Prefab Sprout plays dimly in the car’s questionable speakers and Stan finds himself thinking about how different his mood was when listening to the same song only a few hours before. What’s ironic is that he loves this song, and his father was the one to introduce it to him. Actually, his father showed him nearly all of the music Stan listens to now. He’d play tapes in the car while Stanley sat in the front seat beside him, tapping the steering wheel with his fingertips and stressing that _this is_ real _music_ , and Stanley believed him. Well, he still does, apparently, but Stan thinks that maybe this will be the only thing in life that he will ever take away and use and learn from his father. And a couple 70’s rock songs isn’t enough for an entire fucking relationship. 

_Hot dog! Jumping frog! Albuquerque!_

Stupid lyrics. But he mouths along anyway, ignoring the racing of his heart as he pulls the car into the driveway. When he’d left a few hours earlier, his father had been on the couch watching baseball and drinking beer. If he remembers correctly, he’d been on his third can. With any luck, his dad might have continued his binge drinking, as he normally did, and would be long passed out by now. All Stan would have to do is let himself in the house as quietly as possible and go down to his room in the basement, past the couch, without waking him up. Risky, but it could be done. He knew his dad would see the busted metal in the front of the car at some point, but _please god, not tonight. I’ve been through enough already. I just want to go to bed._

He turns off the car and walks towards the door. He’s climbing the steps when he realizes, with a sinking, horrible feeling in his gut, a silhouette in the window. He feels the blood drain from his face and actually sways on his feet. He considers running and trying to crash at Syd’s, even though she had literally just raised an entire forest and would never let him through the door, but he sets his jaw and places his hand on the knob. 

_Time to be an adult, Stan. Tell him about the car, and accept the consequences._

But that’s not what he’s worried about, and he knows it. 

_He hasn’t been home in a long time, Bud, maybe he’s different now. Maybe he’ll yell and scream, but he won’t…_

Heart pounding, he turns the knob and walks in. 

He hardly dares to look at him. For a half second, he raises his eyes, just long enough to say “Hey, Dad,” before glancing down again. Still, half a second was enough to see the hard-set expression that Stan knows so well; the one that has made his heart drop ever since he was a child. Well, ever since he learned so personally what that expression meant. 

Little five-year-old Stanley with a black eye and a big story about an accident on the playground. Little five-year-old Stan with a new perspective on the big bad world around him and a certain innocence stolen from him that he would never get back.

Stan swallows. “Dad, I can explain.”

“No, I don’t think you can.” His father counters, and that makes Stan look up again. There he is, standing tall, so _sure_ of himself, and though in the time that he’s been gone Stan has grown enough to match his dad in height or maybe even slightly surpass him, he still feels overwhelmingly _small_ next to him. It makes his face burn, and he’s not sure whether it’s in anger or embarrassment. His dad takes another step forward, and this close Stan can smell the stale beer on his breath. 

“Do you want to know why?”

Stan nods numbly, hating himself for it. _Just agree with him. Just suck up to him. Just do anything to get out of this situation._

“You can’t ‘explain’ because nothing you could ever say or do would make whatever the FUCK happened to _my_ car fuckin’ A-OK with me, Stanley, that’s why.” He takes another step towards his son.

“Dad, just _listen_ , please, I--” he begins, taking an unconscious stumble backward and feeling a surge of shame when he realizes it. He starts again and his words tumble out of him, barely formed. “A - a girl ran out in front of me in the dark and I had to swerve to avoid hitting her.” 

_A girl_. Syd is far from just a _girl_ to him, but his dad wouldn’t remember her, and whoever the girl was matters not in the least to his father, or to the situation. All that matters is the crushed metal, the beer on his breath, and the fist curling at his side.

He braces himself for a blow, and then his dad does the last thing he expects. He laughs. It’s far from a nice laugh, but a laugh all the same, and Stanley looks up again with wide questioning eyes. With almost comedic timing, the TV still on low volume plays a laugh track from some old 60’s show, a kind of show that you only notice when it wakes you up in the middle of the night because you accidentally fell asleep on the couch. Stan finds himself smiling nervously. “What’s funny, Dad?”

“I was just thinking how just a moment ago, I was just telling you how I don’t give a single fuck what you have to say.”

“But--”

“And you’re standing there, _daring_ to look me in the eyes after leaving my house looking like a fucking faggot in that ridiculous outfit and coming back in my car that _you_ fucked up. And you’re standing there, making your bullshit version of an _excuse_ for it.”

Stan’s eyes burn and he breaks his gaze for a moment.

“Look at me, son.” His voice has gone quiet and calm. Almost inviting, like he would want to look. Like when he was five and just having learned the meaning of true pain and betrayal, and his dad had beckoned him to come over to _“give Daddy a hug.”_ Wanting so _badly_ to please him, and feeling true sorrow and shame, he had returned to him and burrowed his throbbing head into his embrace. And apologized in his baby lisp for what his father had done to _him_. 

So Stanley looks at him. Because nothing has ever changed. He wants to get on his knees. He wants to apologize. He wants to take off the blue suit and never wear it again. He wants to give him all the money he’s scraped up from working at the bowling alley and put it towards fixing the damage or buying a new car entirely. 

He looks, but he doesn’t find the sick, twisted forgiveness that he craves. His father’s eyes are dark, black, unyielding, unfeeling, unloving. 

“There is nothing you can say to me. Not a day goes by where I don’t wish you weren’t my son and I didn’t have to come back to this piece of shit house and be responsible for you. Your mother left because she couldn’t fucking put up with you, you know that? If it wasn’t for you, we’d be living together somewhere nice and I wouldn’t have to worry about who’s drivin’ my fuckin’ car around or the pain I get in my fucking head when I look at you.”

Stanley barely has time to process the devastation of what he has just heard--something he will never unhear, something that will change him forever and destroy all hope of any sort of relationship with this man that he always seems to crawl back to for validation--before the first blow comes. He hardly stumbles because he had been expecting it. He had been expecting and waiting for it the moment he walked in the door. It’s almost a fucking relief.

His father shoves him against the wall, knocking air out of his lungs and Stanley has to take in a punctured gasp before the fist inches away from his face connects with the same eye that was bruised for two weeks when he was five, the very first time. Stan sees a firework show behind his eye, behind the fist and the thin skin of the eyelid. When he opens his eye, the lid only moves up halfway. Everything is blurry, his sense of depth distorted. This is the first real panic he feels: not knowing how far away his dad is and when the next hit will be. He can handle the pain as long as he knows when and where it will be. Blindly, he rolls his body a pace or two down the wall, until his hip hits the edge of a side table near the couch. 

He absolutely hates the next thing that comes out of his mouth, but it’s all he has left. His only defense. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” he garbles, not feeling the tears but knowing absently they’re there as his nasal passage clogs with snot and blood.

And he is. He’s sorry for everything. He’s sorry for the crime of being five and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s sorry for being there, in the passenger seat of the same car he drove home tonight, listening to Prefab Sprout with his father, and connecting in a way that would make the next seven years of his life hell because it made him _love him_. He’s sorry that he still listens to that music today, because apart from the fact that they’re good songs, they make him feel a sick, twisted nostalgia and safeness, and a feeling of maybe if his dad knew he listened to them, he might be proud or feel some affection towards him. A _at least my son has good music taste_ sort of affection, if you will. The same warm feeling that he got in his chest earlier today, despite everything, because he knew that moments ago he had been blaring The King of Rock ‘N’ Roll, not knowing his dad was home, but knowing now that he would have heard it. And thinking that maybe, just maybe, his dad would have remembered showing his son that song when he was ten years old, and remembered feeling love in his heart for him. He’s sorry that his mother left. He’s sorry for his biggest and most unforgivable crime: existing.

He’s just _sorry_.

And later that night, when he gropes his way to his bed in the blurry dark, his last thought is another apology. To his father, to his mother, maybe, or perhaps to something bigger out there, if It exists. _I’m sorry for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the wrong family. In the wrong world, maybe._

He closes his eyes, and thinks too late that maybe he should ice his face, because he’s already drifting away. _What a world we live in, Sydney._ Isn’t that what he said? He thinks of homecoming, he thinks of the forest and the fallen trees, and thinks once more that he really is by himself. Dancing on his own. But despite everything, despite his bruised eye and broken heart and lost childhood and what he had seen in the forest tonight, he wants to see her. And his will to stay alive and keep existing, maybe just to spite his father if nothing else, burns hard and unyielding in his veins. _Fuck you, Dad._

_Now my rhythm ain’t so hot, but it’s the only friend I’ve got  
I’m the king of rock ‘n’ roll completely  
All the pretty birds have flown now I’m dancing on my own  
I’m the king of rock ‘n’ roll completely … _

Stanley Barber goes to sleep.


End file.
